“Eight miles high
And when you touch down
You’ll find that it’s
Stranger than known”

— The Byrds

British photographer Mishka Henner is known in part for creating beautiful images from high above Earth using satellite images, turning something seemingly mundane into a thought-provoking piece of art. His most recent series, titled Feedlots, eyes the feedlots and oilfields of Texas. Feedlots was showing at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, England, earlier this year.

His series on Libyan oil fields looks like an alien landscape, while his Fifty-One US Military Outposts series from 2010 looks like a collection of sci-fi video game maps. Pumped shows lonely pumpjacks toiling away in Texas fields, some in the middle of neighborhoods.

Using images that are all readily available online, each print is composed of hundreds of high-res satellite photos of each location that have been digitally stitched together into prints, a process that Henner says took hundreds of hours. The images are colorful, and sometimes look less like actual tracts of land than pieces of Texas toast laid next to each other. The one detailing Coronado Feeders in Dalhart, Texas, is a prime example.

These images exist primarily as large prints with exquisite detail, so seeing them here on your smart phone or computer monitor won’t do them justice.

Interestingly, Henner has never even been to our state

“I’ve never visited Texas, except through the lenses of satellites orbiting hundreds of miles above the Earth,” he says.

The reaction of the series has been positive, says Henner, though it does show that humanity isn’t always kind to their surroundings.

Henner says comments have ranged from something along the lines of “captivating horror,” “beautifully terrifying,” and “a critique of capitalism gone mad.” A few have mistaken them for Abstract Expressionist paintings.

The United States fascinates Henner endlessly.

“I never get tired looking at your landscape. Its skin carries the scars of your obsessions and afflictions,” says Henner. “Depending on how you choose to read it, you’re either a vision of the future or a gigantic warning sign.”